Building Abstract Mathematical Sculptures In LEGO
Getcher Mobius strips, Klein bottles, and Costa surfaces here!
Wes Phillips
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Unlikely Bedfellows
<I>Locust Street</I> is exploring 1956. Yesterday's post actually manages to connect Stockhausen to Clarence "Frogman" Henry. True, it's a chronological connection, but I guarantee that nobody will contrive an odder coupling in 2006. Great site, worth a regular visit.
Some Thoughts From John Cleese
No dogs or philosophers allowed. Yes, they're ads, but they're very funny ads.
Retail Computer Buying Experiences
Here's a sobering story about computer buying. <I>[H] Consumer</I> went to Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, and Fry's Electronics to buy a computer and simply tells us what happened. The money quote: "Most retail sales people are simply not going to possess the necessary knowledge to correctly recommend or explain every nuance of a piece of hardware. Even if a sales rep has all that down, a greater skill is required from them: relating that 64-bit-Lightscribe-GeForce knowledge in a non-condescending, helpful way to someone who is unsure what his hardware needs even are. The potent combo of techie know-how and properly relating it to an 'everyday' consumer is a difficult knack to develop. Most sales reps you’ll encounter are polishing one or the other, if not both of those skills, if they posses them to begin with."
Is Technology Changing Our Brains?
<A HREF="http://blog.hometheatermag.com/markfleischmann/">Mark Fleischmann</A> sends us a cautionary link that argues that our immersion in the technological soup of bleeps, blips, and scattershot images is changing us from critters who think in words to ones that utilize pictures.
Hard-Wired For Sound?
Are the brains of animals hard-wired to detect the footfalls (or wingflaps) of predators? Dr. Cord Westhoff thinks so.
Didn't Alfred Bester Invent This?
Yahoo reports on the "tongue port," which sort of combines elements on the space-commando neural switching technology from <I>The Stars My Destination</I> with Chip Delany's direct neural jacks from <I>Babel 17</I> and other early work. Cool—and kind of scary.
Price Gouging and Retail Sales
One of the most common complaints we see when writing about consumer dissatisfaction with CDs is "price gouging" by greedy corporations. Several <I>Stereophile</I> readers have written that they"know" CDs only cost pennies to make, so $16.98 is a rip-off for a product that should sell for under $10.
William P. Gottlieb, R.I.P.
I just learned that William Gottlieb died last night. Like every jazz fan, many of my images of the jazz greats come directly from his photography. Billie Holiday with her head back, eyes closed; Django Reinhardt, cigarette a-dangle, fretting a run; a skinny Frank Sinatra looking beyond the microphone . . .all are indelible Gottlieb images. You'll probably see lots of obituaries in the next few days, but a visit to the Gottlieb collection at the Library of Congress might be the best place to remember him.
Spirals
John Marks writes: "Peter Sykes, who played the Goldbergs live at HE Whatever in NYC, clued me in to the site www.larips.com.<P">Which is “spiral” backwards—and which argues for a solution to Bach’s temperament problem. Sykes finds it convincing.